nhdarchives [licensed for non-commercial use only] / Using Primary Sources
National History Day resources on Using Primary Sources. Includes a few websites with examples on how to use them.
Smithsonian Learning Lab: Discover, Create, Share
free, interactive platform for discovering millions of authentic digital resources, creating content with online tools, and sharing in the Smithsonian's expansive community of knowledge and learning.
DocsTeach
website from the National Archives about teaching with historic documents
Our Documents - Home
The primary source documents on this page highlight pivotal moments in the course of American history or government. They are some of the most-viewed and sought-out documents in the holdings of the National Archives.
The Holocaust: A Learning Site for Students | The Holocaust Encyclopedia
an overview of the Holocaust through historical photographs, maps, images of artifacts, and testimony clips. It is a resource for middle and secondary level students and teachers, with content that reflects the history as it is presented in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Permanent Exhibition.
Teaching with Historic Places (U.S. National Park Service)
teaching tools and lesson plans to help educators engage young people with powerful stories representing America’s diverse history. Historic places in National Parks and in the National Park Service's National Register of Historic Places enliven history, social studies, geography, civics, and other subjects.
Primary Sources - Walker Library at Middle Tennessee State University
links to a variety of places where you can find primary sources on the web
TPS Home - Walker Library at Middle Tennessee State University
Teaching with Primary Sources offers free K-12 professional development thanks to funds provided by the Library of Congress. TPS-MTSU serves educators across Tennessee by improving the way primary sources are used to promote critical thinking in the classroom and across the curriculum. Includes lesson plans and activities as well as tools and primary source sets.
Primary Sources on the Web: Finding, Evaluating, Using | Reference & User Services Association (RUSA)
Links to websites for finding primary sources; provides tips for evaluating primary sources; and how to use primary sources when writing
Making Sense of Evidence
“Making Sense of Documents” provide strategies for analyzing online primary materials, with interactive exercises and a guide to traditional and online sources. “Scholars in Action” segments show how scholars puzzle out the meaning of different kinds of primary sources, allowing you to try to make sense of a document yourself then providing audio clips in which leading scholars interpret the document and discuss strategies for overall analysis.
Education Outreach: Classroom Resources | Tennessee Secretary of State
resources specific to Tennessee state standards for K-12. Includes lesson plans, links to resources, tips for analyzing various documents, and more
Educator Resources | National Archives
all National Archives resources for K-12 teachers in one place. Includes Civics for All of Use, DocsTeach, Distance Learning, Milestone Documents and more
Smithsonian's History Explorer |
website for K-12 educators includes lesson plans, teacher resources, primary sources, and interactive media
Flickr: The Commons
Since launching in 2008 with the Library of Congress, the Flickr Commons has been sharing hidden treasures from the world’s photography archives, with over 100 members.
World Digital Library Home
the World Digital Library was a project of the U.S. Library of Congress, with the support of UNESCO, and contributions from libraries, archives, museums, educational institutions, and international organizations around the world. The WDL sought to preserve and share some of the world’s most important cultural objects, increasing access to cultural treasures and significant historical documents to enable discovery, scholarship, and use.
Digital Collections | Library of Congress
collections of various primary sources from around the United States; can be filtered by document type, topic, collection and more
Volunteer Voices Collection | Libraries
Volunteer Voices provides access to digitized primary sources, such as photographs, letters, diaries, oral histories, and other artifacts, documenting the history and culture of Tennessee. The collection includes materials from archives, historical societies, libraries, and museums from across the state.
National Jukebox LOC.gov
historical sound recordings available to the public free of charge. The Jukebox includes recordings from the extraordinary collections of the Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center and other contributing libraries and archives. Recordings in the Jukebox were issued on record labels now owned by Sony Music Entertainment, which has granted the Library of Congress a gratis license to stream acoustical recordings.
Education Outreach: Tennessee State Library and Archives
A program at the Tennessee State Library and Archives focused specifically on linking educators with primary sources for educational use in classrooms. Students can also easily access the digitized primary sources on our website.
Internet Archive: Free Movies, Music, Books & Wayback Machine
Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library offering free universal access to books, movies & music, as well as 150 billion archived web pages. The Internet Archive was founded to build an Internet library. Its purposes include offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format. The Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages in our collections, and is working to provide specialized services relating to training, education, or adaptive reading or information access needs of blind or other persons with disabilities.
The Big Picture - Boston.com
Smithsonian Education - Educators
Smithsonian lesson plans emphasis inquiry-based learning using primary sources and museum collections.
Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project, digital archive of video oral histories of Japanese-Americans incarcerated or interned during World War II
National Archives Experience
Calisphere - A World of Digital Resources
Calisphere is the University of California's free public gateway to a world of primary sources. More than 150,000 digitized items — including photographs, documents, newspaper pages, political cartoons, works of art, diaries, transcribed oral histories, advertising, and other unique cultural artifacts — reveal the diverse history and culture of California and its role in national and world history. Calisphere's content has been selected from the libraries and museums of the UC campuses, and from a variety of cultural heritage organizations across California
Welcome to the Digital Library of Georgia
The New York State Digital Collections
The Digital Collections provide a gateway to a variety of rich primary source materials held by the State Archives, State Library, and State Museum. Through the collection, you can access photographs, textual materials, artifacts, government documents, manuscripts, and other materials.
Smithsonian's History Explorer
provides presentations on various topics using primary sources and can be browsed by era, grade level or resource type. IT also provides lesson plans and other materials for teachers.
How to View (American Memory from the Library of Congress)
Library of Congress Primary Sources by State; Tennessee - For Teachers (Library of Congress)